Imogen Cunningham was perhaps one of the greatest female photographers of the 20th century. Her ability and will to experiment with new ideas and techniques put her on the map of photography history. She belonged to more than just one movement, more than one subject matter, and followed her artistic vision to have a portfolio of over seventy years worth of images. Her artistic styles, choice of subject, location, and age may have changed, but she never lost the will to be her experimental, story-telling self. She was simply Imogen.

She started her career early on in Seattle as a chemistry student at the University of Washington from 1903-1907. She had purchased her first camera, a 4-by-5 format with a set of instructions, a couple years before time at UW, but her many of her old images are lost due to her decision to fore-go them while moving throughout her life. (Imogen!) One of the earliest images by her that is famously known is her self-portrait on the school’s campus (Fig. 1). At the end of her college years, she saw prints of Gertrude Kasebier’s photography and was inspired from then on to pursue photography as a career. She finds work with Edward Curtis in his studio as a retoucher before accepting a scholarship to study in Dresden with Robert Luther at the Technische Hochschule. She printed on platinum plates by using lead and browning techniques (Imogen Cunningham Trust). At this point in time, her style has been influenced he photo- secessionists and William Morris, but transitioned into more Victorian photography inspired by Pre-Raphaelite paintings. (Imogen!). For Cunningham, revisiting the style of the Pre-Raphaelites was a return to nature as principle and reality (After Ninety).

Before her return to Seattle, Cunningham made small trips to Paris, London, Washington D.C., and Philadelphia. She had wanted to travel to New York, where she could physically meet Alfred Stieglitz, the man who helped pioneer the photo-secessionist she admired. Upon meeting him, he also introduced her to Gertrude Kasebier, the woman who ignited her career in the first place. In the meantime, she wrote an article entitled “Photography as a Profession for Women” where she says, “It is really not so much a matter of suitability to sex as to individuality... Women are not trying to outdo the men by entering the professions. They are simply trying to do something for themselves...” She asserted that it is not the gender that should qualify a photographer but their artistic skills and techniques. After her return to Seattle, she has set up a studio of her own and also found a husband, Roi Partridge who was an artist in his own right and would have twins together within the next year. She photographed in a painterly, pictorialist style, seen in her nude study of her husband (Fig. 2). She was harshly judged for producing such images for their brashness and supposed indecency. The family later moved down to San Francisco for a job Partridge claimed, splitting her time of being a mother/wife and a photographer in a new city, trying to make her way.

Figure 2: Roi Partridge on Mt. Rainier, 1914

She found a studio space where she would meet Maynard Dixon and Dorothea Lange, and would soon after meet Edward Weston. She began her commercial business for portraits and would not give it up simply because she was had a family to take care of. In 1921, her style evolved into abstracted imagery and illustrative techniques. Author, Richard Lorenz claimed “As she refined her vision of nature, changing her focus from the long to the near, she sought out detailed pattern and form...The emphasis on clarity, form, definition, and persona displaces her previous use of pictorialist space” (Imogen Cunningham: Ideas without End). Her works began being focused on tight compositions, emphasizing the detail and texture. She also began using multiple exposures and combing negative & positive prints of her images (Fig. 3).

Figure 3: Hands and Aloe Plicatilis / 1960

This is about when her infamous flora studies started, photographing the simplistic and natural beauty of the single plants mixing with light, inspired by Albert Renger-Patzsch and his botanical studies (Fig. 4,5) . She had stepped away from being pictorialist and wanted to capture realism in her subjects. This also translated in photographic studies on the human body’s purity. Lorenz describes it as “stoic descriptiveness.” She began working in what would be recognized today as her modern, precisionist years.

In 1931, she photographed famous dancer, Martha Graham (Fig. 6). Richard Lorenz points out how “Her renegade use of straightforward photography to penetrate that facade of Hollywood stars and to realistically document them off the set coincided with her association in the late 1932..f.64” (Imogen Cunningham: Ideas without End).

She and fellow Modernist Edward Weston cofounded the f.64 group of photographers, bringing about detailed, sharp, realistic images to the scene. She participated in gallery with the group exhibited at the M.H. deYoung Memorial Museum in 1932, despite never considering herself as an officially named member. She was too experimental and eclectic to be tied to a specific photographic style group. Her images include not only modernism and realism, but surrealism and dadaism. She was able to create a collage of all these styles to create one that was very unique to her. Her husband saw this in her; he could never get passed her independence in art and in life so they divorced. Her sons had grown and she was now a single woman who was now free to further her career in any way she saw fit (Imogen Cunningham: Ideas without End).

Her photographs of Martha Graham had caught the eye of Vanity Fair, so she traveled to New York where she would photograph industrial scenery, known as her “Stolen Pictures.” She would juxtapose the rich and poor aspects contrasting in the city; it was her form of documentary, street photography. She never wanted to be reporter or journalistic, but wanted to capture people for what they are without invading on they lives. Her humanist approach to photography is what set her apart foremother documentary street photographers. This would also be true for her other portraits taken in New York of Alfred Stieglitz, Cary Grant, Herbert Hoover, etc. (Fig. 7) (Imogen Cunningham Trust). She was given the freedom pick her subjects and she said she wished to photograph ugly men. She claimed that there was no illusion about them and you could view them for what they are. The 1930s were full of successful moments, from gallery showings, exhibitions in museums, and publishings in magazines, Imogen Cunningham was thriving (Imogen!).

By 1947, Imogen Cunningham is teaching at the California School of Fine Arts and is living at her home/dark room on 1331 Green Street. She continued to work in portraiture and street photography in San Francisco as well as specifically photographing mothers and homemakers. She would study the true experience and appearances of nude, pregnant women. She was a part of the San Francisco Society of Women Artists, but never acted as an activist.
She says herself, she “...Never set out to make a political statement. It’s pretty tough to make anybody change and I’m not one of the persons who’s going to do it.” She would admonish being referred to as a feminist for reasons unknown, but would still be recognized as one because of her independent nature and motivation to create equality (in many life and art). Her other focus artistically was specifically in artists and writers like Morris Graves, would span her work throughout the 1950s. Denied a Guggenheim grant, she would travel throughout Europe through the aid of Minor White. She would capture a multiple exposure of Man Ray while there, exemplifying the abstracted experimentation she spent much time evolving in this time.

At the ripe, old age of 87 in 1970, Imogen Cunningham would finally be rewarded a $5,000 Guggenheim grant and fellowship after many years of applying. Instead of creating new work, she used the money to develop many old glass-plate negatives from her time in Washington with her husband in the early 1900s. She would soon build the Imogen Cunningham Trust in 1975 to preserve her work for what it is and maintain her business. Amid her building her Trust, she was producing a book entitled After Ninety. She wanted to create a study an old age and death because no one else was comfortable enough to do so; her own age is what gave her the confidence and motivation to produce such an honest series. She shot portraits of people “...whose spirits had managed to transcend their problems” and that was her message to the rest of the world (Fig. 8). Age is but number and does not inhibit people from living their lives the way they always have. Each image was almost a visual trophy dedicated to all the people pas the age of ninety, for getting through life.

Her life’s work was about encapsulating people for what they are and who they are personally. When working on a portrait with someone, she would never dehumanize them or devalue them; she saw the “integrity in natural humanity” (After Ninety). As “the photographer, [Cunningham] was motivated not by external beauty but by the vulnerable human core of personality, the human spirit. If she sought truth, it was about herself as well as her
subject” (After Ninety). She had a freedom when photographing that was almost shocking. Only someone so free of vanity and societal expectations could create powerful, humanist images like her.

At the end of her life, she made a short film documenting her life and work with CBS, Portrait of Imogen directed by Ann Hershey. We are enlightened with about twenty minutes of thoughts and memories from Cunningham’s own mouth. Throughout her entire life, she explains how she felt that she must always be doing something new and innovative simply because she wanted to. This is a woman who would not let anything get in her way of being creative. She always wants to maintain an aesthetic appeal, but never let anything tie her and her photography down to a label. She heavily worked with simplicity, but gave it no formula or explanation. She was so curious that she let her inspirations guide he to experiment and explore many things through photography. And she never lost the passion and vigor of creating photographs and connecting to her subject. “She always claimed the her best photograph would be the one she would make tomorrow” (After Ninety). Age did not effect her quality of life or her work. She dies producing work and never stopping.

Cunningham, Imogen, and Margaretta Mitchell. After Ninety. Seattle : University of Washington Press, 1977.

Cunningham, Imogen, et al. Imogen! : Imogen Cunningham Photographs, 1910-1973. Seattle and London : Published for the Henry Art Gallery by the University of Washington Press, 1974

Hale, Nancy. Portrait of Imogen. Performance by Imogen Cunningham, Lopez Island, Wash.: Meg Partridge, 1988.

“Imogen Cunningham Trust.” Imogen Cunningham Trust, Meg Partridge, www.imogencunningham.com/.

Lorenz, Richard. Imogen Cunningham, Ideas without End: a Life in Photographs. Chronicle Books, 1993.

Lorenz, Richard, and Imogen Cunningham. Imogen Cunningham: the Modernist Years. Treville, 1993.

Simply Imogen